During the currently ongoing GUADEC conference in Den Haag the GNOME release team announced that GNOME 3.0 would be delayed for another six months and is now scheduled for March 2011. "We could release in September and have something working that is okayish, but it's not up to the standards we have" release team member Vincent Untz explains the reasoning. There's coverage of this issue at derStandard.at and an official GNOME press release.

You do have a point, more than a few distros played a pretty big part in the KDE 4 situation pushing the new shiny code out as default before it was ready. To that end, we can only hope they'll be more responsible this time.

But... the KDE team also made the brilliant move of trying to redefine decades of accepted standards of what a .0 release was.

I'm not saying keep it away from the early adopters who are used to having things break and enjoy it, but for the love of $DEITY don't make it default so that Johnny New User's first impression of Linux is a pretty but half working system

KDE4.0 wasn't even default on Kubuntu let alone any other Linux distro. It was a seperate downloadable ISO for people who wanted to beta test.

The problem was people were impatient - went out of their way to run beta software and then complained when everything didn't work properly.

So they really only have themselves to blame, not KDE, Kubuntu, OpenSuse nor anyone else that offered up KDE4.0 packages in parallel to KDE3.5.x